Foreword

As everyone knows, English is often used as the international lingua franca in the field of programming and development. Many open-source projects provide developer documentation only in English, causing developers with weaker English skills to encounter language barriers when reading development documentation.

Some people may ask: Aren't browser translation extensions already quite mature? There is no denying that the translation features built into browsers can indeed solve most documentation-reading problems. However, in some scenarios involving relatively complex formatting, browser translation can produce uncontrollable formatting errors, which in serious cases may even affect the meaning of the documentation.

When I previously contributed translations to the Vue.js Chinese documentation, I wondered whether the documentation of most open-source projects was also open source, and whether I could fork a copy into my own repository for translation, then deploy it to provide access to Chinese documentation.

In April last year, I was on a business trip in Liaoning. When production was suspended at the customer's site, I spent several consecutive days slacking off at the hotel while still getting paid. Since I happened to have time, I began working on this project and created the first repository, resulting in the first Commit.

At first, I only intended to translate documentation to help myself learn how to use it, so the documentation was deployed only on my own domain. It was not until I started translating the second project that I began to wonder whether it would be possible to provide all popular open-source projects with a sustainable Chinese documentation ecosystem, using the vast open-source community to jointly maintain localized Chinese documentation translations.

Thus, the open-source project I am introducing today—Simplified Chinese Documentation—came into being!

Project Introduction

On April 29, 2024, the day after returning from my business trip to Liaoning, I registered the GitHub organization with the username zhcndoc, and also registered the zhcndoc.com domain as the project's primary entry point. I therefore consider this day to be the project's founding date.

According to the BCP 47 (Best Current Practice 47) standard, zh_CN represents Simplified Chinese. The English word documentation can be translated as 「文档」, so combining its abbreviation doc with zh_CN produces zhcndoc, meaning 「简体中文文档」, abbreviated as 「简中文档」.

Project website: https://www.zhcndoc.com

Project repository: https://github.com/zhcndoc

As of now, Simplified Chinese Documentation maintains Chinese documentation for a total of 25 open-source projects, 7 of which serve as mirrors of official documentation. The Nuxt Chinese documentation is visited by the largest number of developers. Here are some recommended Chinese documentation sites:

For more details, see the Project Explorer on the Simplified Chinese Documentation website.

First Anniversary

Over the past year, I have not publicly promoted the Simplified Chinese Documentation project. I only mentioned it briefly in issues and recommended it to group members when communicating in WeChat groups. Nevertheless, organic traffic from search engines has also brought Simplified Chinese Documentation some recognition.

After integrating Umami analytics in May 2024, the project has received a total of 454,000 page views and 75,000 visits to date, with approximately 40,000 visitors in total. Among them, 83% of the traffic came from Baidu and 12% came from Bing.

In terms of website SEO, according to queries on webmaster tools, the current Baidu weight is 2, while the Sogou and Bing weights are 1.

As the largest search engine on the Chinese internet, Baidu has maintained stable keyword rankings and indexing ever since it began indexing the site. Google is not very friendly toward indexing new websites, and there is currently not much exposure. Bing blocked the entire zhcndoc.com domain last November, clearing all indexed pages. It was not until recently, after multiple appeals, that the restriction was lifted and indexing and ranking authority were restored. Sogou and other search engines have not taken any targeted action.

Future Plans

Although Simplified Chinese Documentation has reached its first anniversary, I believe it is still a project in the early stages of development. Many translation guidelines have yet to be established, and the process for contributing translations still needs improvement. Guided by the principle of pooling everyone's wisdom, everyone is welcome to join Simplified Chinese Documentation, share ideas, and work together to build a better localized Chinese documentation knowledge base.